PHOTO: RENÉ GROENEVELD
PHOTO: FARMBOT
WATER MANAGEMENT ▶▶▶
Farmbot can save farmers money and time
BY RENÉ GROENEVELD F
armbot, which started up five years ago, is the brainchild of Chief Operat- ing Officer Craig Hendricks. Based in Sydney, he wanted to monitor his ol-
ives, truffles and cattle in the Southern High- lands of New South Wales. Hendricks created a system of sensors and a device to make those sensors communicate with him in his office. Managing director Andrew Coppin met Hen- dricks at an accelerator programme and decid- ed to invest in it. “And here we are five years later”, he says, “with a rapidly growing Internet of Things device. Our primary focus has so far mainly been on the livestock industry, where water management is such a big deal.”
Farmbot is now also delivering its technology to arable farmers and horticulturalists. “We have recently been doing work in cotton, where we have been monitoring cotton rows in trenches for water levels.” The Farmbot technol- ogy makes it possible to connect up to 20 dif- ferent devices. “One of the key devices we offer is for rainfall. “Of all of our customers 53% have a rain gauge and an increasing number are measuring pressure and flow within their water system. We see that farmers also often include pump activation as well.” Farmbot has recently launched its next generation of remote water monitoring technology, enabling it to integrate with other agtech devices, in order to also monitor soil moisture, machine control and ge- otags for farm management, for example. Most of its technology is connected to satellites.
Andrew Coppin says that the importance and details of water management can be easily un- derestimated. “Maybe it’s because it comes from the sky or the ground,” he says. “We won- dered, if we started to look at the granularity of water, what would we learn? Now, with more than 2,000 devices in the paddock, we learned a lot about water ecosystems. We’re telling farmers things about their water
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The Australian company Farmbot Monitoring Solutions helps farmers to manage their water system. Its precision technology can save farmers both money and time.
systems that they have never expected to know.”
The obvious information that Farmbot delivers is related to leaks in the water system “when a pipe bursts or a tank splits. But less obvious in- formation is the draw time on bores for exam- ple. People put a bore down and don’t check it again for twenty years. But it might be that for four hours a day, it’s just sucking air. You’ve got the wear and tear on pumps, the additional carbon footprint, and you’re not using your time efficiently.”
Farmbot can also provide the trends of a water system over time. “It gives farmers peace of mind. We now have farmers who are checking 50 waterpoints over a cup of tea. And they can now tell the bore man exactly where he needs to go.” So far Farmbot has focused on Australia, but next year the technology will be commercially released in North America. The Farmbot core
A Farmbot monitor.
device costs 1,190 Australian dollars (US$ 770, € 710 ) plus there is an annual software sub- scription to use the Farmbot platform. This gives farmers all the intelligence involved and sends them trends, alerts and insights.
“Farmers will get a year-on-year comparison”, says Coppin. “We’ve had farmers sending us their financial analysis, saying that our technol- ogy saved them AU$ 20,000 to 30,000 (US$ 13,000 to 20,000) per year.”
Managing director Andrew Coppin of Farmbot: “We’re telling farmers things about their water systems that they have never expected to know.
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 22 May 2020
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